“And my mother?”
“Your mother? Damn, I knew we forgot something!”
Firefighters rescue man from wrecked car, but leave his mother in the car. Her body found in tow yard next day.
Next time guys, check both air bags.
Alas, clicking on the link directly gave me a registration page. However, going there via Google News does not require registration.
my imagination fails me. the best excuse they could give is that they had asked the driver? they couldn’t have looked? :smack:
Yes, let’s take the word of someone in critical condition who’s just been in a major car accident, he’s sure to be thinking clearly. Isn’t the fact that an air bad deployed an indication that someone was probably in that seat?
No. Only that the sensors told the SRS to deploy the front bag system. Some cars will deploy bags only if they detect the seat is occupied, but most manufacturers look at that and say, “Why would I do that? If it mis-detects, then a bag doesn’t deploy when it might be needed (and then we get sued), and replacement bags are a $1,000 part, o why not deploy a many a po$$ible?”
I’ll see the :smack: on the part of the attending medics, and I’ll raise you a :eek: for whoever found mom.
This is not quite correct. Up until MY 2006 there was no requirement to detect a passenger, and not deploy a bag in an unoccupied seat.
Starting in MY 2006 the government requires that the passenger bag system detect if there is a child or adult in the seat, and if the bag should be turned off, or de-powered, so called smart air bags.
I am sure other car makers do it in different ways, but with Volvo this required a pressure sensor for the seat, a strain gauge for the seat belt, and a seat position sensor to determine if the passenger was sitting so close the bag needed to be de-powered. A whole bunch of hardware to make sure we don’t kill little Johnny, or Grandma.
The part of the story that made me go :dubious: was the line of how they didn’t see her because of the air bag.
A passenger air bag on a Volvo is about as big as a 33 gallon trash bag. Picture taping a large trash bag to the dash of your car. Could you hide under the bag and not be visible? Unless she was unrestrained and wound up in the foot well of the car, I don’t see how they could miss her.
According to the 2nd linked story, she was found in her seat still belted in.
From the article
samclem, Boyo 
First off I read the LA Times which did not mention seatbelt usage.
Secondly the fact that she was wearing a seat belt does not alter my point in the least. Unless she was unrestrained and wound up in the foot well of the car, I don’t see how they could miss her. Meaning if she had a seat belt on, there is pretty much no excuse I can think of for them not to see her.
Yes, I got that, and I was reinforcing the point that there was no excuse.
My bad.
So, the implication you guys are making is that they saw her- Then decided they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, and sent her off to the junkyard??
What about the tow truck driver? How could he not notice her being in there?
Several sources cited in the story said she was of slight build. I can imagine a small, elderly woman slumped to the side covered by a deployed air bag. I can also imagine it being standard operating procedure to lift the deployed air bag and look under it …
I don’t think they’re implying that. I think the point is that they might have been too busy/lazy/incompetent to check for another person or that somehow, unknown to us, she might have been obscured and she was missed. Which is pretty incredible. I mean, we’ve all been in cars.
No. They’d be stupid to do that because her body would be found in the junkyard eventually. Either by an insurance broker who needs to see the wreck to assess the damage for payout, or a by a mechanic gutting the car for parts. The paperwork wouldn’t go away, it would just get a whole lot more complicated.
They were careless/negligent.
Although in the story I saw several days ago on Fark, they said that the driver had to be extricated rather carefully, so I though there was more damage than what these later articles are suggesting. You’d think it would be standard op though to cut away both airbags.
I always thought those ‘Baby on Board’ signs were really stupid. They were originally intended to ‘alert rescue personal to search for the baby’ and I always thought “Of course they’ll check the entire vehical”.
Well, I guess I was wrong.
Can they tell if the woman survived the accident, and, if found earlier, might have lived if treated? Or did she die in the wreck, and her body simply wasn’t noticed.
Apparently she died “shortly after” the wreck, but it has not yet been determined if she would have survived if the paramedics had started working on her right away. It probably all depends on how long “shortly after” really was.